"... it was getting too cold all over the place. The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records, so OK, they’re at a record level. There were so many thing happening, Piers. I’ll tell you what I believe in. I believe in clear air. I believe in crystal clear beautiful water. I believe in just having good cleanliness in all." President Donald Trump, January 26, 2018

Photo: Jabin Botsford - The Washington Post/Getty Images

Donald Trump is not a scientist.

He often speaks nonsense.

President Trump’s interview with Piers Morgan, broadcast January 26, demonstrated clearly that the President does not understand the basic concepts underlying current scientific thought on global climate change. His take was false and ridiculous.

This is an excerpt from the transcript of the interview:

Piers Morgan: Do you believe in climate change? Do you believe it exists?

President Trump: There is a cooling and there is a heating and I mean, look – it used to not be climate change. It used to be global warming. Right?

Piers Morgan: Right.​President Trump: That wasn’t working too well, because it was getting too cold all over the place. The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records, so OK, they’re at a record level. There were so many thing happening, Piers. I’ll tell you what I believe in. I believe in clear air. I believe in crystal clear beautiful water. I believe in just having good cleanliness in all. Now, that being said, if somebody said go back into the Paris Accord, if we could go back into the Paris Accord, it would have to be a completely different deal because we had a horrible deal, As usual, they took advantage of the United States. We were in a terrible deal. Would I go back in? Yeah, I’d go back in. I like, as you know, I like Emmanuel [Macron, president of France] … No, no, I like Emmanuel, I would love to, but it’s got to be a good deal for the United States.

President Trump is again suing the Property Appraiser of Palm Beach County, Florida, over the valuation of his Jupiter golf course.

The Palm Beach Daily News reports that President Trump filed the lawsuit in December 2017.

The Palm Beach County Tax Collector billed Trump for $398,315. He sent a wire transfer of $296,595.01, and filed a lawsuit. The Palm Beach Daily News estimates that Trump’s payment suggests that he thinks the Property Appraiser overvalued the course by over $5 million.

According to a Twitter post from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Trump listed the property in his presidential financial disclosure as worth “over $50 million,” the county valued the property at $20 million for tax purposes, and Trump is claiming that it is worth less than $25 million.

"Hackers from the Dutch intelligence service AIVD have provided the FBI with crucial information about Russian interference with the American elections. For years, AIVD had access to the infamous Russian hacker group Cozy Bear. That's what de Volkskrant and Nieuwsuur have uncovered in their investigation."

A Dutch newspaper and television station published an important article on January 25, 2018 that has gotten scant attention in the American press. Huib Modderkolk reports that in 2014, Dutch intelligence agents penetrated the Russian hacker group Cozy Bear, also known as APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) 29, even taking control of their closed circuit television camera. Dutch agents captured video showing who entered and left the building in Moscow out of which Cozy bear operates, allowing them to match images with photos of known Russian spies.

"... they were in the computer network of the infamous Russian hacker group Cozy Bear. And unbeknownst to the Russians, they could see everything."

This story is vitally important to American investigations into Russian interference into the 2016 presidential election, and possible coordination between agents of the Russian government and members of the Trump campaign team. However, American news outlets have not covered the story as the bombshell it is, spending their airtime and print space on other things.

Since U.S. media was slow to pick up the story, business analyst Eric Garland translated the story and provided his translation through Creative Commons license. His translation of the article can be found here.

“Attorney General Jeff Sessions was questioned for several hours last week as part of the special counsel investigation, the Justice Department confirmed Tuesday, making him the first member of President Trump’s cabinet to be interviewed in the inquiry.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is increasingly focusing on potential obstruction of justice by President Trump in relation to the firing of FBI director James Comey in May 2017. Mueller’s team has informed the President’s lawyers that he will likely interview him in person.

As a strong supporter of Trump during the campaign, and his foreign policy advisor, Sessions was close to the Trump team throughout the campaign, while he was a sitting U.S. Senator.

During the transition between the election and Inauguration, Sessions was one of a number of prominent Republicans who served as vice chairs: Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie, former House Speaker (and current spouse of the U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican) Newt Gingrich, retired neurosurgeon (and current Housing and Urban Development Secretary) Ben Carson, retired Lieutenant General (and briefly serving National Security Advisor) Michael Flynn, and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (whose son currently works in the White House).​An article about the transition team, written a few days after the election, can be found here.http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2016/11/sen_jeff_sessions_leading_trum.html

Twitter recently announced that they will let nearly 700,000 users that they interacted with accounts identified as part of a propaganda campaign financed by the Russian government in 2016.

Unless you have seen the process taking place in real time, it is difficult to understand how bots (automated social media accounts), trolls (real individuals aggressively attempting to sow division or discredit experts), and sock puppets (persona accounts run by a real person who is not the person portrayed in the account profile) can spread divisive messages, silence debate, and use abuse and harassment to push political issues in a particular direction.Once you have seen it in real time, it is clear how influential Russian government-financed troll, bot, and sock puppet activity split American voters into angry, isolated camps with little inclination or ability to bridge divides and find consensus.A team of researchers at the University of Washington examined Twitter discourse related to #BlackLivesMatter and police-related shooting events in 2016, and their discoveries have broad and important implications for how Americans can combat the onslaught of divisive messaging and disinformation. One important discovery is that the groups on the two “sides” of the issue were quite separate, with almost no overlap in retweets or conversation. The researchers found that Russian accounts identified as originating at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg - a Russian government-financed troll farm - were clearly working in both pro-Black Lives Matter and anti-Black Lives Matter groups.

The diagrams tell the story. The first shows the isolation of the two groups - people in each group interact primarily with others who express the same views. The second diagram shows Russian-Internet Research Agency identified accounts in orange. It is clear that Russian paid accounts were very active in the separate groups, amplifying divisive messages and increasing division and disagreement.The researchers conclude:“In this paper, we have located RU-IRA-affiliated troll accounts in the retweet network of a politically polarized conversation surrounding race and shootings in the United States. Our findings suggest that troll accounts contributed content to polarized information networks, likely serving to accentuate disagreement and foster division. Furthermore, our findings imply that the troll accounts gained a platform in a domestic conversation, suggesting a calculated form of media manipulation that exploits on the crowd-sourced nature of social media.”Two articles from the University of Washington research group can be found here.

Thanks to Kate Starbird of the University of Washington for sharing this research on Twitter.

“This is a really helpful article, but fairly hard to read (and i don’t think I’m dumber than most readers). But maybe I can offer an analogy that I find useful; no doubt crypto guys will tell me I still don’t get it, but here goes.

“As I see it, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are in effect like digital gold coins, in the sense that they can't be counterfeited. A gold coin is worth its weight in gold, no more, no less; if you're suspicious, you can bite it to make sure

“Cryptocurrencies use cryptographic techniques plus distributed storage to create non-material entities that are nonetheless impossible to fake. You don't have to worry whether a Bitcoin is a *real* Bitcoin.

“It can, however, be stolen -- just like real gold coins. You can take precautions, but you can do that with gold coins too --or for that matter with money in your bank account, which is also nonmaterial http://fortune.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin-theft/

“The questions you should ask are (1) what problem does this clever solution solve? (2) what determines the fundamental value? As far as I can tell, there are no good answers to either question

“Cryptocurrency lets you make electronic transactions; but so do bank accounts, debit cards, Paypal, Venmo etc. All these other methods involve trusting a third party; but unless you're buying drugs, assassinations etc. that's not a big deal

“Meanwhile, what backstops a cryptocurrency's value? Paper money is ultimately backed by governments that will take it in payment of taxes (and central banks that will reduce the monetary base in case of inflation)

“Gold is actually useful for some things, like filling teeth and making pretty jewelry; that's not most of its value, but it does provide a tether to reality, along with a 5000-year history

“Cryptocurrencies have none of that. If people come to believe that Bitcoin is worthless, well, it's worthless. Its price rise has been driven purely by speculation -- by what Robert Shiller calls a natural Ponzi scheme, in which early entrants make money only bc others buy in

Simpson explained how Fusion GPS was first hired in 2015 to investigate Trump's background in the early stages of the Republican presidential nominating process. Simpson hired Steele to investigate connections between representatives of the Russian government and the Trump campaign.

Simpson testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, and before the House Intelligence Committee in November. Simpson and his business partner, Peter Fritsch, had called for the Senate and House committees to release the testimony.

Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS testified to the House Intelligence Committee on November 8 and 14, 2017. The committee voted unanimously to release the testimony today.

Many experts are reporting that the testimony is fascinating to read. The testimony covers the facts discovered as Simpson's firm began looking into the financial dealings of the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign. Simpson asserts that he was very surprised when he began to investigate and found so many potential cases of money laundering:

" ... we threw a line in the water and Moby Dick came back, and we didn't know what to do with it at first."

According to Buzzfeed News, the Haitian government asserted in the 1980s that ousted dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, known as "Baby Doc," laundered stolen treasury funds when he bought a Trump Tower apartment for $446,875 cash in August 1983. Duvalier used a Panama shell company called Lasa Trade and Finance to buy the apartment. Trump signed the deed of sale.

“The Special Counsel has received handwritten notes from Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, showing that Mr. Trump talked to Mr. Priebus about how he had called Mr. Comey to urge him to say publicly that he was not under investigation. The president’s determination to fire Mr. Comey even led one White House lawyer to take the extraordinary step of misleading Mr. Trump about whether he had the authority to remove him.​“The New York Times has also learned that four days before Mr. Comey was fired, one of Mr. Sessions’s aides asked a congressional staff member whether he had damaging information about Mr. Comey, part of an apparent effort to undermine the F.B.I. director. It was not clear whether Mr. Mueller’s investigators knew about this episode.”